This is actually one of the reasons I founded our company [1]. I had talked to a lot of companies about doing exactly this and the feedback was, "yeah, but we don't want to hire for that". So the idea was to provide bare-metal servers with DevOps included, and thankfully it is going rather well!

The thing that really gets me is that one of the reasons it is hard to hire non-cloud engineers is the pressure applied by the cloud companies. Either because they hire those engineers, or because they do their upmost to ensure everyone reaches for AWS Lambda instead of systemd (which, in many cases, would do the job just fine).

Anyway, I could bellyache about this for hours (and, of course, the cloud does have its place), suffice to say I agree.

[1]: https://lithus.eu